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Re:German military kicks off heavy lift helicopter competition by rbanffy on Friday December 15, 2017 @09:19AM (#15931931)
We shouldn't underestimate what we don't know about building machines. Maintenance should accommodate time to check for wear on parts we don't expect to, to check things that are different from what we expect them to be. The problem was there for decades and one inspection in one unit over that period would probably have evidenced the issue and added one more item for the maintenance checklists.

It's not like the manufacturer can't schedule a full disassembly of a unit 10 years into its lifetime. Car magazines do it.

Re:German military kicks off heavy lift helicopter competition by dmoy on Friday December 15, 2017 @12:01PM (#15933162)
> It's not like the manufacturer can't schedule a full disassembly of a unit 10 years into its lifetime

Wait hang on, I was under the impression that a D check (?) did exactly this, every 6-7 years. This is second hand knowledge from a pilot buddy so maybe I'm forgetting something. Also it's on the civvy side of things, maybe the military does stuff differently?

If it's as simple as the military has shittier maintenance checks, then that's a solvable problem.

Edit: ok looked it up, it is a civilian vs military thing.

Re:German military kicks off heavy lift helicopter competition by geezerjay on Friday December 15, 2017 @01:44PM (#15934012)
> Maintenance should accommodate time to check for wear on parts we don't expect to

How much time do you spend performing exhaustive checks for problems that don't exist?

Re:German military kicks off heavy lift helicopter competition by rbanffy on Friday December 15, 2017 @03:07PM (#15934630)
Very little. In this case, a single inspection (assuming all units were affected) over a period of 20 years would have prevented losses that more than compensate the effort of the added scrutiny.

Also, I like to be the first to know I'm wrong. If I make 100 aircraft and dedicate one to disassembly for study after a quarter of its estimated life, I'll be a .75% investment on better understanding my product. If De Havilland had done that, the stress on the square windows of the Comet would have been discovered before they started falling from the skies and we'd all be flying more beautiful planes.

I was shocked when I found out that, in more than 100 flights, nobody inspected the underside or the leading edges of the shuttle in orbit to check for damage incurred on lift off. They were pretty sure the only dangerous part of the flight was the re-entry.

You say a problem does not exist. You may have good reason to think it doesn't, and, yet, people die because it does.

Re:German military kicks off heavy lift helicopter competition by colechristensen on Friday December 15, 2017 @02:45PM (#15934452)
You should.

You absolutely should spend time looking for things you expect not to find, because sometimes you will be wrong.

When you're maintaining an aircraft, a nuclear plant, or anything sufficiently complex or life critical, you should spend a certain amount of time looking for ghosts. You _will_ find them. Your model of an engineered system should include a finite rate of unknown bugs.